Over the Rainbow

Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature

Edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd

Significant essays on LGBTQ topics in children's literature

Description

In spite of the growing critical interest concerning gender and sexual nonnormativity in and around narratives written for young readers, no book-length volume on the subject has yet appeared. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature is the first collection of essays dedicated to LGBTQ issues in children's literature. Bringing together significant essays and introducing new work, Over the Rainbow is intended to serve both as a scholarly reference and as a textbook for students of children's studies; gender/queer studies; and related disciplines such as English, history, sociology, and education. Editors Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd showcase important essays on the subject of LGBTQ children's and young adult literature—including Harriet the Spy, Rainbow Boys, Little Women, the Harry Potter series, and A Separate Peace—while providing a provisional history of both the literature and the scholarship and examining the field's origins, current status, and possible future orientations.

"Over the Rainbow is lively, engaging, and thoughtful. More to the point, the field of children's literature needs such a collection." —Katherine Capshaw Smith, University of Connecticut

Cover art: Original title page of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow. New York: George M. Hill, 1900.

Kenneth Kidd is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida.

Michelle Abate is Associate Professor of English at Hollins University.

Praise / Awards

"Over the Rainbow will be a valuable resource for librarians as well as for those with an interest in what has increasingly become a genre read by adults regardless of its intended audience." —Gay & Lesbian Review

"...What makes this book exceptional is the fact that the editors have carefully woven an invisble thread that stitches older to the more recent essays." —Lance Weldy

"For each group of essays, Abate and Kidd raise questions ... about 'the canon' and the relationship between queerness and canonicity; identity politics and the transformative power of children's literature; and how queerness moves among nonnormative readers, reading practices, and genres. Taken together, these tensions highlight the fundamental questions underpinning queer approaches to children's and young adult literature, which scholars will inevitably face as we navigate the flexible and shifting meanings of queerness." —Children's Literature Association Quarterly